Samanage, a SaaS platform that lets customers manage any type of internal asset, announced $16 million in Series B investment today.
The round was led by Marker, LLC and Vintage Investment Partners with participation from existing shareholders Carmel Ventures, Gemini Israel Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. This round brings the total investment to $24 million.
The company’s roots are in IT asset management, but company founder and CEO Doron Gordon points out that the same technology could be used to manage any assets within an organization, whether it’s related to IT or not.
“If you think about it, every company in the world once they get to a certain stage, they have to have an IT service desk. What we do is expand the IT service desk and turn it into an enterprise service desk,” Gordon explained.
He says that once they organize IT assets, the company can expand to HR, finance or facilities and operations. Samanage began in the asset management business when it launched in 2007. In 2012 it launched a service management solution that could apply to IT or other departments that required similar tracking and help-desk capabilities. This put them in competition with Zendesk, Freshdesk and Salesforce.com.
The company has begun by focusing on small- to medium-sized businesses. Its strategy to this point is to find an IT champion. Once it has traction inside a company, it tries to attract users from other departments who might have similar requirements. It grows from there.
Today, it has also expanded to benchmarking, allowing customers to see how they compare against peer companies, something Zendesk has also done. “One of the big challenges for our customers is to measure performance of the service team and identify opportunities to improve performance. They tend to go on gut feeling or guessing,” Gordon said.
“What we have introduced last month is a new benchmarking product, using a multi-tenant SaaS platform to easily measure service and benchmark against industry peers,” he explained.
Lluis Pedragosa, who is principal at Marker, the venture capital firm that led the round says this is a differentiator that caught his company’s attention. “One of the attractive things for us was true multi-tenant architecture. Others have on premise or single tier. Samanage was truly born in the cloud. They allow clients to benchmark operations against other clients in the network,” he said.
Gordon says he hopes to go after larger enterprise customers in the future, but the company is taking a go-slow approach. It will add larger enterprise customers over time as it builds the support system to handle larger organizations.
“The big thing for the enterprise is making sure the sales team and delivery team are in place and setting up a relationship with partners and the channel to support that. We expect to be active in a couple of years time,” he said.
The company currently has 50 employees with a main office is in Cary, North Carolina. It also has a 20 person engineering team in Israel where the company started.
Gordon says he plans to use some of the money from this round to double the number of employees over the next year adding to sales and marketing and investing further in product innovation.